I agree. This kind of abuse is a matter of degree, and exists also outside of religious communities. You can have a political cult that could be explicitly atheist, or an economical cult which is nominally about making money (i.e. an anti-religious or an a-religious group), which would still follow pretty much the same template.
I don’t want to debate the labels here. (Not that I deny the importance of good labels, but because such debate could get us far from the original topic, e.g. into discussing the trade-offs between labels that fit better but you need to explain them to everyone vs labels that just point approximately in the right direction but people quickly recognize them, etc.) But I’d like to mention that Robert Jay Lifton, whose model I used here, calls it “thought reform”.
I agree. This kind of abuse is a matter of degree, and exists also outside of religious communities. You can have a political cult that could be explicitly atheist, or an economical cult which is nominally about making money (i.e. an anti-religious or an a-religious group), which would still follow pretty much the same template.
I don’t want to debate the labels here. (Not that I deny the importance of good labels, but because such debate could get us far from the original topic, e.g. into discussing the trade-offs between labels that fit better but you need to explain them to everyone vs labels that just point approximately in the right direction but people quickly recognize them, etc.) But I’d like to mention that Robert Jay Lifton, whose model I used here, calls it “thought reform”.